This Wonderful Life @ The Cleveland Play House
No more Ralphie. No more BB gun.
Instead of A Christmas Story, there’s a new holiday play at the Cleveland Play House. The amazing James Leaming plays every character in the Christmas screen classic It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1946 film starring James Stewart. Leaming, who spent time chatting with the audience before the show, provided a “just right” folksy persona as he re-told the story, playing in turn the wife, the uncle, a little girl, and so on. The actor’s dazzling response time reminds me of comic genius Robin Williams, but he’s a Robin Williams (thankfully) under control.
The set is simple, the sound system essential, and the show — written by Steve Murray and conceived by Mark Setlock — is true to the “aw-shucks ain’t life grand” feeling of the original film, a film built on the exhaustion and optimism that swept the United States after the end of World War II. We (and George) see, at the end, that his life was worth living and in ways he couldn’t recognize without a bit of time travel courtesy of the angel. The story owes a lot to Dickens’ Christmas Carol with its insistence on supernatural revelations of the value of love and family. For a show supposedly about the non-necessity of money for happiness, it is ironic that the last scene involves happiness exemplified by dollars floating down from the sky like snowflakes. The production ran a bit long (no intermission) and put several nearby children under twelve either to sleep or into states of whiney, candy-crunching boredom.
Bottom line: Leaming’s ability to switch from the hapless, well-meaning George to the Scrooge-like Mr. Potter to Clarence the Angel Who Needed to Get His Wings made the show, overall, a delightful tour de force of acting virtuosity.
This Wonderful Life runs now through Sun 12/19 @ the Cleveland Play House, located at 8500 Euclid Ave. http://ClevelandPlayHouse.com.
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.